Part 23

Barcelona's position as an industrial force cannot be called unexpected. She has ever been in the stir of big events, Italy's rival in commerce through the Middle Ages, when she served as the port of entry and exit for the armies and fleets. In all times she has enjoyed a climate that may well be the despair of commercial cities of the north; the summer heats are tempered by sea-breezes, the winters are warmer than at Naples. Hearing reports of roses in bloom there in January, we had dreaded the heat of a May in the city, but during the five weeks of our stay, the bracing spring air was like that of New England. Her natural setting, too, is good; the harbor guarded by the lofty fort of Monjuich, while behind stretch mountains which lay far from the mediæval town, but to-day, when Barcelona covers an area twelve times as large, they are immediate suburbs and their names are familiar signs on the tramcars.

The province of Catalonia is perhaps the most individual of the thirteen strikingly different provinces of the Peninsula. The Catalan is more Spanish than French certainly, but he is always more Catalan than Spanish. Independent, self-interested, intractable, strong-headed as an Aragonese, industrious, successful, in him is found slight trace of the hidalgo of Castile. It is hard to believe that this hive of born business men is in a land whose ideal of happiness is to do nothing. The idleness, the high-bred courtesy of the Castilian, are as unfamiliar here as in the Stock Exchange of New York; indeed Barcelona, with her streets filled with well-dressed, briskly-moving crowds, each intent on his own business, is more allied to the new world than to the old. Adieu, indeed, to the toga-like capes, to mantillas, to midnight serenades. A Catalan has no time to waste chatting by alluring _rejas_.

Catalonia has been called the Lancashire of Spain, and Barcelona its Manchester. If the comparison is fit in regard to commercial success, it is inappropriate in one respect, for, built by a Latin race, to whom is natural a sense of beauty, Barcelona, though as keen after money as the English town, has cared better for her interests. The sunlight is not darkened by the miles of factory chimneys that so oppress the heart in the black country. There are hundreds of belching chimneys, but they are kept out of sight in the valleys behind, where each factory stands isolated in the fields, often in a planted enclosure: this leaves the city proper free of traffic, smoke, and the whirr of machinery. The gay Rambla is edged with shops, and handsome apartment houses line the tree-planted avenues. Few towns have the force of will and continued patience to build themselves symmetrically; they are generally the result of hap-hazard, and only when too late the possibility of some river or sea front is discerned. Barcelona realized some fifty years ago that she was to be one of the conglomerations that modern cities tend to become, so she called on her engineers for plans, and from one of those submitted she chose an able design; _Ensanche_, extension, is the name for the new districts. Of course if a whole city consisted of these wide, regular streets, it would be monotonous, but here was already enough of narrow-lane picturesqueness to satisfy the artist. The walls that encircle the congested older town were pulled down, the opened space was turned into an esplanade, and radiating from this nucleus, streets two hundred feet wide were laid and were immediately planted with double rows of plane trees. To-day the vistas down these far-stretching avenues, the sunlight filtering through the leaves on groups of nurses and children, the rapidly-moving crowds, the smart two-wheeled Catalan carts, the whirling automobiles, give the city an air of joyous prosperity. Behind the big apartment houses, the law requires a planted space to be kept open, so that people of very mediocre income live in houses and in districts that only the rich of other towns can command.

The material success of the people has found an outlet in their architecture: Poblet, school for the builder, is not far away. Since some of the houses were put up during the exaggerated phase of _l'art nouveau_, they are overloaded with whirling ornament, quite as bad as Karlsruhe, but the majority are in dignified good taste: take, for instance, the new University buildings, or that brown stone block near the beginning of the beautiful Paseo Garcia, Nos. 2 and 4, if I remember rightly. The sculptors too have inherited the skill of the early masters of Catalonia. Most of the modern churches (not Señor Gaudi's curious experiment, the Church of the Holy Family!) are built consistently in one style, the walls carved _in situ_ as in old times; the effect is such that one prays the days of painted plaster may never return. It was good to notice, too, that the new churches discarded the tinsel-decked altars of the eighteenth century, the bane of Peninsula shrines. Barcelona builds as a rule in the Catalan manner; the early architects of the province, though influenced by Lombard and French masters, may be said to have achieved a national style. It is worthy of enthusiasm with its singular purity of line, a proportion that is hardly Spanish. Like Chartres, it has "the distinguished slenderness of an eternal adolescence." In nothing is it akin to Isabella's efflorescent Plateresque-Gothic. Its clustered piers, and arches carried high aloft, have been used as successfully in civil as in religious architecture, witness the Lonja, or Exchange.

The new town, with its prosperous homes and shady avenues, tended to make us overlook old Barcelona, yet we only had to step aside from the thronged Rambla and we found ourselves in dark, narrow streets, that at dusk especially made us shiver with apprehension. Forcibly they warned us that this was one of the most turbulent cities in Europe, where lawless socialists gather and plot, where some recent bomb-throwing outrages were the reason for groups of the _Guardias Civiles_ on every corner. The red _gorro_, the Phrygian cap worn by the city porters, seemed too realistic when met in dark lanes, where the men pushed rudely by, your sex here no prerogative. With Philistine relief we used to return to the sanitary, orderly avenues of the _Ensanche_, patrolled by placid policemen in crimson broadcloth coats. A word of praise must be given to some of the municipal institutions of Barcelona, such as the corps of city porters, each with a small district in which to render help. The _hospicio_, or work-house, is considered one of the best organized in Europe. As long ago as 1786 an English traveler, the Rev. Joseph Townsend, wrote of another of Barcelona's institutions: "No hospital that I have seen upon the continent is so well administered as the general hospital of this city. It is peculiar in its attention to convalescents, for whom a separate habitation is provided, that after they are dismissed from the sick wards they may have time to recover their strength." Also her excellent city police are worthy of praise. The rest of Spain could emulate them, for it was our experience that the local police were an incompetent set; we soon learned never to apply to them in case of difficulty, but to wait till an alert Civil Guard[37] passed, when we were sure of intelligent help.

It is the old town, congested and gloomy though it is, that, set side by side with the new, makes Barcelona unique. There are to be found primitive churches, such as Santa Ana, or San Pablo del Campo,[38] once, like St. Martin-in-the-Fields, placed among meadows; dim old churches similar in design, Byzantine cross form with a low dome over the center and with cloisters that make solemn oases of repose in the busy city. A later period built churches whose somber walls tower high above the crowded houses; such are Santa María del Pino and Santa María del Mar, characterized by wide hall-like naves. In the width of their nave lay the triumph of the Catalan masters. It was in the last named church that a pious woman of the town noticed one day a gray, emaciated man resting, among a group of children, on the steps of the altar, in his face a light of convincing holiness. Fresh from the spiritual battle in the Cave of Manresa, a grand self-mastery the reward of his struggle, no wonder the face of Ignatius compelled the reverence of the passer by.

The Cathedral of Barcelona is a typically Catalan-Gothic church. For an _eglesia mayor_ it is small, but so true are its proportions and so skillfully is it lighted that it gives the effect of grandeur. As the clearstory windows are mere circles, on first entering one is in complete darkness, but gradually out of the gloom looms that loveliest feature of the building, the chancel, lighted by rare old glass, with slender piers and lofty stilted arches rising from pavement to vaulting in an unforgettable beauty of symmetry. The _retablo_ of the High Altar is in character, articulate and graceful, unlike the usual, overladen reredos of Spain. Incense, prayer, soaring aspiration, the symbolization of this presbytery is a perfect thing: again vividly came the conviction that temples such as these have had and ever will have a vital influence on a race.

Barcelona may be a shrewd commercial center, that in its material pride, in order not to be classed with the improvident, brutally repudiates most of the _cosas de España_; she may print books whose every word is an insult to government and religion; she is still deeply Spanish in the earnest piety of the larger proportion of her citizens. A Catalan may tell you, especially if you belong to a northern race and a different creed, that what you see is all form, lip-religion, that the men here, like intelligent men the world over, are free-thinkers. It is an easy matter for the prejudiced visitor to get all his misconceptions confirmed by a native, no one is more bitter in abuse of his country than a Catalan. Fortunately, one has one's own eyes wherewith to see. But first I must quote from a recent letter to the _London Times_ from the Rev. James R. Youlden, in answer to a pessimist on the religious condition of Spain:

"In the city of Barcelona, the largest, most modern and most industrial of Spanish cities, the good attendance at Mass, not only of women and children but of the men, is most remarkable, as is also the number of communicants. I have myself often given Holy Communion on a Sunday morning in the church of San Pedro to such large numbers, fully one-third of them men, that my arms have ached in conveying the sacred particles. Masses are celebrated every hour, and in some churches every half hour from 5 A.M. to 12 midday in all the twenty-four parish churches of the city (to say nothing of numerous convent chapels) in the presence of large and often crowded congregations. A visit to the church at any time from 8 till 12 on any Sunday morning would dispel some of the illusions of your Madrid correspondent."

A good test of the sincerity of religious conviction is what it costs the purse; new churches, like those of Barcelona, are not built by lip-religion. I spent several Sunday mornings sitting on one of the side benches of the Cathedral, learning that the Catalan, disunited from his mother land on many points, is ineradicably national in his creed. This was Spain, with the grave reverence of the smallest child, where the church is a loved home, a frequented refuge for meditation and strengthening prayer. Now a handsome and satisfied matron enters, followed by five or six children, the boys dressed as English sailors, little Battenbergs, the girls with hats like flower gardens; they cluster round their mother at the door, and she passes each the blessed water with which to sign themselves. Behind this group come some alert young artisans; each instantly drops on both knees to make his salutation to the Altar--lip-religion does not care to disarray its Sunday suit like this--and each blesses himself in the swift national way, with the final carrying to the lips of the thumb and first finger crossed, a symbol of fidelity to his faith. May this custom never die out in Spain! From the first hour of her eight hundred years' crusade, from Cavadonga to Granada, her religion has been her glory, interwoven with her nationality, like that of the Jews of old, and if she understands her enduring interests, this Christian faith to which she has clung so loyally will be her aspiration in the future. When her men pass the High Altar without salute, when the street children cease to run in daily to kneel before a shrine, throwing their scanty skirts over their heads if a handkerchief is lacking, when politics and religion are synonymous, that day Spain may be called degenerate, but not now, while lamps of sincere conviction burn before her altars.

Ascension Thursday fell on a perfect day in late May, the warm sunshine tempered by a sea breeze; everyone was out gallantly in new summer suits. The houses were hung with the national flag, but the fairest decoration of the city were the hundreds of First Communicants who thronged the streets, accompanied by proud mothers and relatives. Each little girl in her quaint, long, white skirt, tulle veil and wreath of flowers, carried a new pearl chaplet or prayer book, and each boy wore a bow of white satin on his left arm. Few things are more appealing than an innocent-eyed child on this solemn day, and in after years, for those who have known such hours of purity, few memories are more indelible. As I passed through the old city, its dark streets lightened by these groups, I could not help exclaiming, "Why, when she can present a scene of such loveliness and hope, must Barcelona so blindly envy her neighbor across the Pyrenees!" Not long after leaving Spain, I stopped in a village in the mountains of Dauphiny, half Catholic, half Huguenot. Both churches were practically empty. The children of the town, except those of a few stanch families, walked in a public procession to honor the mayor, behind a banner bearing the inscription, "Ni Dieu, ni maître." One cannot deny there are many in Barcelona whose aspiration would be satisfied with a similar procession in her streets, but the majority still prefer an Ascension Thursday of First Communicants.

Before the west door of the Cathedral are remains of ancient houses which, like Italy, bear the signs of guilds, for this city always differed from the rest of Spain in looking on trade as an honorable career. A street behind the Cathedral leads to other specimens of domestic architecture. Be sure not to be discouraged by the cold Herrara front of the House of the Deputation. It masks a Gothic building which, if properly restored, as well as the Casa Consistorial, or Town Hall, which stands opposite to it, would make of this formal plaza one of the most interesting squares in Europe. The city's renewed pride in the Gothic of its province, her skillful architects, her wealth, should tempt her to the task. Be sure to go into both these buildings. In the Town Hall are some lovely _ajimez_ windows that show the restraint of the Catalan style: they attenuated the features as far as strength would allow, but they knew just where to stop. The result is grace, lightness, a subtle something of proportion. In the Deputation House hangs the Catalan painter Fortuny's "Battle of Tetuán," unfinished, with a dashing rainbow-hued charge of horsemen that stirs the memory of Spain's grand forays into Africa.

In exploring Barcelona one notices unfamiliar names on the shops, here are no longer Alvarez, González, Pérez, García, but strange Catalan names, such as Bosch, Cla, Puig, Catafalch, Llordachs, Petz. On every side, in shops, in the tramcars, one hears the dialect spoken, rather rough sounding and wholly unintelligible to the traveler who knows only Castilian. In no other of Spain's provinces is so much made of local differences. The names of the streets are written twice on the street corners, in Catalan and in Castilian, a ridiculous arrangement, for in these proper names the differences are slight; as _Calle de Cortes_, and _Correr de les Corts_. To appease his thirst for self-assertion, the practical Catalan has marked his streets in a less adequate way than the rest of the Peninsula he looks down on: the clearness of the street directions, each tile generally holding one bold letter, had been a satisfaction all over Spain. This brings me into hot water at once, the vexed ever palpitating Catalan question. Is this province, Spain's richest and most progressive, to continue under the Spanish crown, to ally herself with France, or to be independent? She tells us in anger, she pays more than her share of the taxes, that she is an isolated commercial and industrial force in a nation that is preëminently agricultural, whose laws are made to foster the farmer at the expense of the trader: the loss of the colonies was an advantage for the rest of the country whose crying need is population, but for Barcelona it was a severe blow. Spain has hard problems to solve, with thirteen inhabitants to the square mile in some provinces and one hundred and eight to the mile here in Catalonia.

Books of open sedition are freely published, one picks them up in the waiting-room of a doctor's office, in the bank, on the stalls. This is no new phase. From early times Catalonia has only considered her own interests, now joining with France against Spain, now changing sides, as she thought to benefit herself; for her the nation is a secondary consideration. History proves she has been ineradicably selfish; hence her success, a sophist may say, but there is something higher than self-aggrandizement, the success of giving her strength to reforming the abuses she proclaims. No one denies there is crying need for political and financial reform at Madrid, though it is not to be brought about by such a book as Señor Pompeo Gener's "Cosas de España," which but widens the breach. One discerns it in the ignoble jealousy of the Castilian, which rankles in the Catalan mind; for instance in speaking of Castilian literature of the nineteenth century he stops short at Fernán Caballero and makes no mention of the distinguished modern novelists. A writer who holds up Herbert Spencer as the ne plus ultra of philosophy (Spanish free-thinkers are a generation behind in certain phases of thought) need not be taken too seriously, but the "Cosas de España" voices what is serious.

"Ah Castillo Castillano! why have we ever known you!" exclaims the Catalan poet Briz, in his celebrated poem, "Cuatro pals de Sanch," the blazon of the province, its four red bars. "If to us remains only one of our four bars of blood, to you we owe the loss, thou kingdom of the castles and the hungry lions. But, O Castillo Castillano, alas for you, if you break our last _pals de sanch_!" This bitter spirit of revolt makes this grand old province that should be Spain's bulwark, Spain's weakness instead.

Would Catalonia gain by any of the changes she dreams of? Surely under the formalism of France, her self-willed independence would chafe and break loose, for independence is a characteristic of all Spaniards, in all ages, now and always; one cannot exaggerate it. Also the heart of the province is too deeply religious to live under the "Liberté" of her neighbor. In the United States religious liberty is little talked of, but is a solid fact, wherein the new world gives a needed lesson to the old, with its narrow horizons and petty disputes. In France, where this liberty is vaunted, it is a farce: no Catalan could long tolerate such freedom. Again, if this small state were independent, where would she stand? A thought that strikes one forcibly after a tour of the province, whose towns, Gerona, Lérida, Tarragona, are of mediocre importance. Catalonia independent would be practically one city, Barcelona, whose trade the central government could cripple by prohibitory tariffs. Her pride would suffer more as one of the smallest, weakest states in Europe, than it now suffers under its lawful king, part of an old race that once led the world, and which if only this discontented daughter would generously help, has red blood enough to again play a prominent part. Spain needs just such help as the Catalan can give, she needs his grit, his industry, his progressiveness. Could he now bear the overweighted burden in a better spirit, before many years it would be lightened. The north is awakening to industrial life; Bilbao, Santander, Gijón, Coruña, Vigo, will soon be strong trading centers, and the older commercial city can gather supporters to work for fiscal autonomy, since the chief grievance is the centralized system of government in Madrid. Let her agitate in a constitutional way for a system like the separate state arrangement of our union. The opposition of two vigorous sides is a sign of life in a nation. Discussion means change and advancement. For full vigor both sides are needed, the conservative to serve as brake on the democrat's too swiftly-turning wheels. An important cause of Spain's decay,[39] according to Don Juan Valera, came from all classes thinking the same way; drunk with pride on the ending of the centuries of crusade against their Moorish invader, with the discovery of a new continent the people lay back in slothful inertia, without the prick of dispute to rouse them. Opposition and struggle are essential to vigor, but disloyalty saps a nation's strength. Let them strike straight-front blows from the shoulder, for Madrid needs rousing, but let them not stab in the back. Often when wandering among the old tombs of Spain, those effigies of the grand-masters of Santiago, Calatrava and Alcántara, the plumed and helmeted knights of the noble brows, I recalled some ringing lines of Newbolt's. Every boy of Barcelona should know them by heart, they are not so needed in Castile:

"To set the cause above renown, To love the game above the prize, To honour while you strike him down The foe that comes with fearless eyes. To count the life of battle good, And dear the land that gave you birth, And dearer yet the brotherhood That binds the brave of all the earth."

Her intense local patriotism has a more sympathetic side than double-naming her streets and bearing a jealous grudge against her central government. This is the revival of her provincial literature. The interest in dialects and folk lore is a tendency common to many countries to-day, but in Catalonia the movement is on a grand scale. There newspapers and magazines in dialect are circulated, poems and novels are printed not for the literary alone but for the populace. Men of undeniable genius have written in the local tongue, one of the first to use it being that strangely interesting character of the thirteenth century, Ramón Lull, seneschal of Majorca, troubadour, mystic hermit, philosopher, missionary, and his final glory, martyr for the Faith; he is honored in the Church as _el beato_ Raimundo Lulio. By less than ten years he missed being the contemporary of the gentle Assisian, the habit of whose tertiaries he wore; he wandered through Italy while Dante was writing his visions, in that wonderful century called dark, that can claim a Thomas Aquinas, a Bonaventura, an Abertus Magnus, an Elizabeth of Hungary, a Dominic, an Anthony of Padua, and that scattered over Europe such witnesses of its upleap of aspiration as Amiens, Chartres, Westminster, Salisbury, Cologne, Strasburg, León, Toledo, Siena.